Jax in the Box

Well, today will be another short note day since I wanted to write about something but I couldn't really figure out what to write about, so without further delay, here's what comes to mind.

Dominion Released

As all of the League of Legends players know, and only after about... maybe a full week or so, of open public testing, the new game type Dominion has released, I wrote about it a few days ago and I enjoyed it a lot then. Since then, I've found myself wanting to play Dominion more than the Classic game type which I guess is apparently just called “Classic”, and I wanted to do that for a few but important reasons.

1. I'm okay at the early lane phases but I don't really enjoy them that much
2. I prefer the champion fighting
3. It's shorter which is kind of a half like and half dislike point for me as I was one of the people that enjoyed Alterac Valley when it was hours or even days long, however I believe the League of Legends community (generally speaking is very bad, so when getting random people, the duration for which you have to deal with undesirable people is lessened. Finally onto the last one
4. I am much better at Dominion

All of these reasons make Dominion a much more enjoyable experience for me, even though it's not the type of gameplay that the developers are used to. It definitely shows to an extent as Dominion isn't as balanced as it could be for certain champions (I'd also argue that Classic isn't either) . However at the same time Dominion is way more balanced than Capture and Hold game types in other titles such as World of Warcraft. In said game, usually a lot of the games are one sided in terms of which side wins because your team's total points still drained down as long as you held a base.In Dominion, even if you have one point left and the enemy has 300, you can still win so long as you don't allow them to control more bases. It basically creates a game type where as long as you have players, you have a chance of winning essentially even if the enemy team is a lot better at combat than your team is.

In summary, Dominion is fun for me, and while I do still like the Classic mode, right now Dominion is so much better at capturing my attention, and I don't see myself losing it for awhile.

Jax

I've recently been playing mostly melee champions in Dominion, and Tristana but that's another story, playing melee champions of course made me eventually run into Jax who I didn't really see played that much, but when I did run into him as Garen* or Trynadamere who both are auto attackers, I ended up usually losing to him unless I had a advantage somehow in player numbers or health-wise which made me curious about him. I honestly thought Trynadamere was overpowered but it's actually kind of hard to play him in Dominion because he's so item dependent and income is actually slower in Dominion I believe than in Classic, at least in terms of how it scales with level. Jax on the other hand is someone who I didn't think was that overpowered until I played against him, and I actually wanted to play as him because I knew he was strong but like Trynadamere, I was thinking that there would be some challenge to playing him. I found out that I wasn't wrong in a sense.

After spending a whole day with Alice playing as Trynadamere and learning a ton about him, I was tempted into trying Jax out. We started off with a bot game to try out new characters as usual and I ended up thinking that Jax wasn't as strong as he seemed, that was before I started to get starting items however, and I was able to 1v1 most champions later on fairly easily. The results of that test however were kind of iffy and it didn't really seem that fun to play Jax, so I ended up trying him out in Dominion for a few games before I turned in for the night.

It was literally a different experience which by now I could expect, in fact I would argue that fighting bots in generally much harder if they didn't do stupid things on purpose. Back to the main point, what I found out that Jax's early game is stronger than Trynadamere's but he's by no means godly at this point, he does become that later on though with his opening ability (Leap Strike) and his powering up ability (Empower) being able to take most people without defenses down to 30-60% health letting him quickly finish them off with his auto attacks. Furthermore, he also has a defensive Counter Strike that when he dodges an attack, he is able to strike back, doing minor damage but more importantly stunning everything in a short distance around him, and his ultimate allows him to do extra damage every 4^th hit and it speeds up his attack speed passively, it can also be activated to provide magical resistance. Basically, he starts off somewhat weak but by no means the weakest, and then he starts to hit very hard. On the defensive side of things however, he can be countered by simply buying an item that prevents Jax from dodging the user's attacks, thus rendering counter strike unusable, while it's not the end of the world, and I personally have beaten someone using the item 1v1, it definitely hurts Jax quite a bit. The other part is that Jax is fairly vulnerable to ranged attacks, and melee attacks too for that matter as he's not the most durable character around, and like every character in the game, he can be killed very quickly when he's focused. So while Jax is strong, so are many of the other characters in the game, and he still has specific items, and skills that counter him very well.

Right now I'm kind of iffy about if I want to keep playing him or switch to another champion to try them out, I Still haven't really figured out a couple of champions that I want to play a lot, practice with them, and I guess in a sense “master” them.

*When I played Garen I followed a build that starts off with him being a “spinner” and then after he gains a Phantom Dancer, he relys on auto-attacks.

Dominion Early Trial

Today to my surprise when I logged on Alice and Adam told me that Riot allowed the public to play the new League of Legends game type Dominion for “a short time”, little did I know that this time was only for 2 hours but I was lucky enough to wake up early to play 2 matches of it, and in short, it left me wanting to do it a lot more.

As someone who read very little about Dominion but still enough to know that it was putting the focus on having champions engage in quick and fast battles, I was very surprised at how well Dominion has executed on it. For those that don't know, Dominion shifts the goal away from destroying towers to capturing towers instead, it does keep the 3 lane map scheme to an extent, but for the most part it's 2 groups splitting up at the start and then meeting the enemy's two groups at the middle of a node. With 5 nodes, it's capture and hold basically, however the placement of the towers is somewhat curious for me, instead of having 2 of each side and 1 in the middle or something similar it's basically 4 corners and then one at the top in between two more, I think this somewhat inspires people to focus more of their forces on the top lane instead of the bottom as it gives a bigger lead if you can manage to win the battle that'll ensue.

There are also random buffs placed around the map which are fairly easy to figure out, I personally didn't know buffs would take that form as I didn't read about it, however they're marked with boots and health icons, so someone with even one match-worth of experience will know what both of those indicate, boots being speed, and health being minor healing. Finally there is a third buff in the center of the map called a Storm Shield, there are two of them and they are reserved for their respective teams apparently, what the shield does is that it seems like a simple shield that absorbs a great amount of damage, much larger than most shields certain player characters are able to create. I only got the buff once, and that's the only effect that I saw, however the name Storm Shield almost makes me think that it would provide a offensive benefit as well. So, while the map is very interesting but fairly standard if you've played a lot of video games in the past, it's a huge change on the game play that one expects from League of Legends.

In my first match Alice and I took both of the bottom towers fairly easily against 3 players, I was playing Garen and she was Lux. Right off the bat I noticed that an item that I've become somewhat dependent on was unavailable, that being Doran's Blade, however I just decided to go for boots of speed and try to build up a Phage into Frozen Mallet as soon as possible as that was still around. When we got into combat, actually fighting players was a lot different as well as the overall feeling felt a lot more offensive rather than running away and doing small harassment to the enemy, the three that we fought against made no effort to harass at all until we killed 2 of them and only one was left, I also noticed that killing players affected the overall score which is called the Nexus Health in Dominion, so with controlling more towers affecting the Nexus Health, and killing players also affecting it, the goal of course was to still bring the enemy Nexus down before yours.

Despite having the excellent start, the midgame somewhat became a bit more iffy, while our team wasn't doing poorly by any means, I simply concentrated on offense too much, and there were many times when I did something I shouldn't have, simply because I didn't know about it, such as fighting around a enemy tower. As I was a fairly high level at the time, I didn't think the enemy tower would be that bad and the enemy I was targeting was at low health as it was, so, being used to the damage that normal towers in the classic game mode do, I rushed in of course. To my misfortune and surprise, the towers hit very hard, probably harder than most of all of the towers in the classic mode other than the spawn position towers. Furthermore, I later found out that the proper way to “rush” a node is to have someone channel a capture on the tower to prevent it from firing, at which point you can kill other players while at least one player is channeling without fear of the tower's wrath. Regardless of that however, I simply did not contribute to the team capturing nodes enough and our first game was a loss.

Our second however was much better as I was more knowledgeable about the game mode. We did a 3 top and 2 bottom start, where only one person went bottom against us on their team, so we disposed of them quickly and headed up top where our team was actually winning, in fact by the time I arrived most of the enemy team was dead and I only helped finish off one of the retreating players. The game was pretty one sided with a lot of memorable moments for me, at one point, and this is the point where I figured out how capturing a tower works, I was capturing a tower with an Irelia and a enemy came to try to stop us. She got off the tower and went to intercept them and they were literally fighting like 2 inches away, the fight was pretty even but I felt so bad knowing that I could just turn and kill them but then the tower might have posed a problem even in that short time, so I had to just watch without being able to do anything. She managed to win though, and afterward a enemy player that came to help him showed up, since the capture was done I was able to charge them gleefully.

Another moment that I really liked was when after I killed a enemy I was at pretty low health, but Singed was still around with roughly the same amount of health. Seeing that my ultimate was up, I ran into the bush with the plan to try to burst him down quickly, he came to try to finish me off and I quickly hit decisive strike and Demacian justice which managed to kill him, thankful that it worked I quickly recalled since I didn't want to get into any other fights before healing up. Finally while there were a lot of good awesome moments done by Alice and I, and the team in general, they weren't as funny or interesting as these, including this one. Alice was defending a tower from a Master Yi and was winning, since he was near a wall he tried to escape, however I showed up at that moment and then seeing me, he turned around, but then he also saw Alice there as well, so he was effectively cut off and of course we cut him down.

In short, Dominion is awesome if you're like me and not good at the farming part of classic Defense of the Ancients; it's arguably less strategic but I'm sure there will be parts where both teams group up and fight each other in normal league of legends fashion. In the end though, it's simply replacing minion farming with more PvP combat essentially, and I think that both champions and players that prefer to attack players instead of minions and towers will have a good place with League of Legends now.

Riven Opinion and Experimentation Results

As many people know, somewhat recently (although probably like months ago in “gamer time”) Riot Games released another new champion in a fairly short time after Talon, that new champion is Riven. I personally was excited to try her out but I at the time lacked the influence points to purchase her, so after playing a good amount of games I was able to afford a 6300 point champion. While there was a lot of champions that I wanted to buy like Renekton, Gangplank, Amumu, and even Talon after trying him out since he was on the free rotation for the week, I knew I could only get one and I was kind of tempted to see how Riven is. I did face my fair share of Rivens in a few PvP matches and noticed that they were always somewhat good at harass depending on the player early in the game, but near the end of the game is where they basically became a free kill, and I was curious about that, I could have easily chalked it up to “they didn't know what they were doing” but pretty much everyone fits in that category for now.

The first time I played Riven, I, like a lot of other players who were new to her, spammed her abilities like crazy but I noticed that this didn't do a lot of damage which dumb founded me. I did know about her passive at the time which creates extra auto-attack damage after doing any of her abilities, but I didn't know that her entire play style basically revolves around it. It wasn't until I was doing poorly in games, and I was forced to watch the Champion Overview of her from Riot Games, as well as reading a few player guides on Mobafire, that I found out. So, with that knowledge in mind along with a new build that mixed AD items and survivability items, I tried out Riven again in a few Coop matches against bots. It went fairly well actually, I was surprised at how much of a difference revolving everything around the passive made, and I was also really impressed with the item build so naturally like all of the other champions I've played on League of Legends, I wanted to see how she would function in PvP.

To put it simply, I've had vastly mixed results. The first match I tried out after practicing was one I did with Alice, we decided that our preferred characters weren't really compatible lane mates, so we just went with whoever seemed appropriate in our matched random group. I ended up going with a Maokai who kind of did reckless things, in any case however we were against a Master Yi, and a Ashe which worked out pretty well, I was able to get some kills when they overextended, and for the most part Maokai could harass on his own so I was rarely in danger while I harassed too. That continued onto the endgame, while I did notice that Riven was considerably weaker, and easily focused, I was able to do decently well. Unfortunately while I had high hopes after that match, they weren't destined around to stay for too long.

The next day when I wanted to practice Riven more, in the morning before Alice had to leave for work we did a quick Coop game for practice and points. I was laned with a Tristana and we did really well, I was surprised. On a side note, Adam joined us too for the game and he as Leona laned with Alice's Lux and did well. Back onto the main topic however, after everyone left for business elsewhere I decided to practice Riven more in PvP matches to get used to her, but it wasn't just practice that I ended up getting, it was more like a revelation. The games didn't go as well as they had the day before, I don't really remember my laning partners, but I do remember in one of the games I could hardly do anything against a Talon who was good at harassing. His rake just limited my mobility way too much and Riven is heavily dependent on mobility to do anything it seems like to me. I don't believe I was partnered with laning partners that synergized well with Riven either, although I can't remember which specific champions that I was partnered with.

As I always like to say though, in the end I still admit that I don't know Riven well enough to say that she's weaker than other champions who's players are probably at least 90% of the time are using an established build that works, where as Riven's builds are still in debate. However, there's a lot of problems that I personally have with her. She does not do the damage at mid and end game or even early game that other melee characters are able to do, and they're able to do it much easier as well with simple auto attacks or abilities. Gangplank or Garen are both other melee characters I've played and with DPS builds they have about the same survivability that she does, however they're able to kill much easier with Gangplanks Parrrley able to do 1k crits, and his melee attacks hitting for 400-600 easily. As for Garen, he's much easier to use than Riven and he's great early game a lot like Riven, endgame however I was hitting fairly quickly for almost nonstop crits of 600-700, I hit a Singed to death so that was fun.

All in all, I like Riven's backstory, and her as a character, however in a primarily competitive game, that to me is not exactly about winning although that helps, but at least giving a really good shot at winning, I don't believe I enjoy playing her when everyone else picks champions that have solid builds, and are proven to be very good at what their role is instead of just mediocre.

So for now, after reading a confirmation of it especially on a guide on Solomid, I've decided to still keep Riven in mind, but experiment with more champions for now. Specifically Garen.

League of Legends - Negative Players

I have been playing quite a bit of League of Legends recently (or Leagends as Alice and I like to call it because we don't really like saying LoL for it) and while I primarily did Coop matches, Alice and I have started to get into playing PvP matches more often. This of course has led to finding people that aren't the greatest teammates ever fairly quickly and not in the skill department either, it's that they are simply negative jerks. The most recent one I've had was when I was practicing Amumu on my own while Alice wasn't around to play with and so I could be able to play well with her when she does have time, but that's getting offtrack, so back to the main point; the most recent and probably the inspiration of the post was someone did the following :

1. Arrogantly said “you're welcome” every time they helped with a kill
2. Complained about kill stealing
3. Didn't like that they weren't doing well and said that they were “sucking” which I normally don't have a problem with, however, they also wanted to surrender because of this (the fact that they weren't doing well), right after we killed the entire enemy team which made no sense at all to me.

We ended up winning the match anyway, but it still wasn't exactly the most enlightening thing to see, especially because in just the game before that, I also had a very similar teammate who did the exact same thing, I'm pretty sure they weren't the same person. While we're on a list mode, I've also seen people that :

-Have wanted to surrender after dying once

-Complained about kill stealing (of course)

-On the above point, also complained about kill stealing after winning (because of help) a losing duel between themselves and someone else

-Complained about others while not doing well themselves in a completely unrelated lane

-Not select a champion at the start and not leave the match setup, so they end up just AFKing/Idling the entire match or disconnecting while the game is in progress

-Purposely run in and die against the enemy team to level them up

-(I didn't personally see this one but Adam apparently has) Sit in the main friendly base and use wards to make smiley faces

-And many other things I haven't seen yet

Normally I would be used to this because of my World of Warcraft Battlegrounds experience, however it seems to be much more rampant here, and not only that but for sure, having a “bad” team mate impact the rest of the team much, much more in League of Legends. For those who haven't played the game (which I still recommend trying even if you don't like it to start off with), having a bad team mate I would say... increases the chance of a loss by at least 30% if not more, because if the enemy team is good, there are many more things a team with 5 team mates could do as opposed to one with 4.

In the end however, having bad team mates isn't that great for a non-social person like me who doesn't like communicating with strangers in the first place, but I try to do it as much as possible to be polite or to help the team, at the very least to help the team in any case. It's very disheartening, frustrating, and annoying to try to say something even like “garen mia, possibly going to mid” and then to get a dumb response in return. For me even, it's a huge deterrence to just see other people argue and complain to each other or make fun of each other when a team mate makes a mistake somewhere.

I suppose it's because League of Legends is a Free to Play game and from what I've seen a majority of the F2P (no offense to anyone of course) communities are very bad. World of Warcraft doesn't seem to be much of an improvement, but I've at least had reasonable conversations with WoW players now and then, whereas it almost feels like a lost cause for League of Legends.

However, I can't do much to change that, and the fun factor along with wanting to be better at League of Legends offsets the “dumb” players factor pretty well, in fact despite this entire post right after it I plan on playing another game with Amumu for even more practice, so overall I guess while it is annoying, it's just something that you have to deal with, and this isn't to say all League of Legends players are like that, it's just that a majority seem to be, but of course, only time will tell.

Update on streaming status

Well after about 3 days straight or possibly more days on working on setting up my computer to be able to stream with fairly clear resolution it became apparent to me that I'm unable to do that so long as I have the processor that I currently have. I figure this because right from the start Livestream's Procaster is appearently one of the least hardware demanding streams aviaible and I'm unable to do that, furthermore even though it's somewhat clear on my side, all of the other streams do put my CPU usage at 80-100% regularly, so in the end I'll just have to go about getting a new processor in order to stream to reasonable quality.

There's also the possibility that my internet connection isn't suitable for it, but I don't think that's the case as I was able to successfully stream on my past computer without too many issues, I don't think there was any stutter, and the resolution was somewhat good too. The main difference however is that it was on Xfire, and I did notice some stutter on my end, but it wasn't as bad as it is now, and there wasn't any problem with the audio at all.

So in short again, while I would like to have streams for the blog eventually, that isn't something that's possible right now, and I will be shifting my focus unto more reasonable things for the time being instad

The Ustream Audio Issue Resolution

Since I spent pretty much the entire day trying to figure that out, as well as going to a few other services before hand I decided I might as well write about it. It turned out to be quite a stressful experience that I'm glad I'm finished with.

The entire story of the experience is quite a long one, but it came down to that I was just looking for a streaming service that would allow me to stream in the first place and be fairly coherent with the hindrance of my not really great PC. The first thing that came to mind as usual was Procaster which Alice and I used frequently for other games, and it actually worked fairly well on my old PC too, but evidently that PC had more processing power than my current one, and I experienced more than a few problems. To start off with, I was trying out the new Procaster that completely shuts off when a computer is above using it's threshold of 80% or higher CPU processing power, so since my computer was constantly at that limit, I wasn't even able to get the stream to start. I didn't give up there however , I instead reverted to a old version of Procaster that Alice and I used to stream games that weren't enabled on Xfire in the past, however that didn't work too well either, the sound was stutter and it made my system lag to near in-playability, I also experienced stutters with the sound on my computer as well, so that wasn't exactly ideal. With all of that, it made me renew my quest to find out a new streaming service that would allow me to broadcast fairly easily.

The first one that I came across and I had tried to set up in the past was Ustream, and as I understand, Ustream is a pretty popular streaming service for non-gamers, but some gamers did find out a way anyway to use it for our purpose. A very long time ago I followed a guide about setting it up for gaming and I completed the process about halfway until it gets to a part where it literally says to buy a external program to allow sound to come through onto the broadcast. I didn't want to do that of course so I stopped there, coming back to the Ustream service after all of this time, I still encountered that problem of course, and it was a headache to solve, in fact it took pretty much all day. I read many different guides saying to try out different programs, and some even said to enable microphones but I found out that was more for enabling chat programs such as Skype, Ventrilo, and Team Speak rather than what I was trying to get, so I ignored many of those guides and I really couldn't find any hints on what to do. This resulted in me giving up on Ustream once again and trying to go to another service, since I've played a lot of League of Legends recently I've heard of Own3d streaming, so of course that was my next stop. When I got there I literally registered once and then it said to download a streaming program that is in beta at which point I had to register again, however every time I tried to register it didn't process and I did try almost every possible alternative such as changing my password or user name but it still didn't go through, to make it even more annoying it didn't actually give me a reason why my action didn't happen. So of course, I gave up on that, last but not least we have Justin.tv, again, I heard a lot of good things about the service however, I don't like that it uses it's own program for desktop and game streaming that gives 10 free uses and then forces a charge. It also offers free webcam streaming like Ustream, but that didn't help as it led me back to my soundless problem, and I decided I prefer Ustream to Justin.tv anyway so I left that idea behind.

That brings us back to Ustream, after doing some tests on Procaster again and deciding that it was just too unstable and more annoying than fun, Ustream was basically the only option I could think of, so I just had to get sound working. To my luck I did a few more searches and finally came upon a answer that seemed pretty good, it was on a post from someone having the same problem as I was, and it was answered by a moderator, it of course said to go to another page where the question was already answered but the mod's answered in a very helpful fashion. While they did say to go to another page they did identify the problem, and on the other page the problem was finally fixed as I found out I had to enable a disabled device that prevented my computer audio devices to be selected. So for future reference and for anyone that reads my blogs, I would like to point this part out because it was very helpful, and just in general, while the process of getting computer streaming on Ustream to begin with is a hassle, I think if Procaster or some other stream isn't working out for you, Ustream can be a fairly good alternative.

1.)You need a video device that would allow redirection of the desktop to the broadcast, I personally use Manycam which is a webcam with desktop footage options. Ustream has also thought of this problem and has released it's own desktop viewer called Ustream Producer, and while it's not only for the desktop or it's primary purpose might not be that at all, it definitely would allow you to stream your Desktop.

2.)As for audio this part is the part that really confused me, unlike what some guides say, you don’t really need to do anything special. In order to literally get computer audio (not microphone or anything like that audio) you need to do this : go onto the sound window in control panel then go into recording and make sure “Show disabled devices” is enabled, afterward all that's left to do is enable “Stereo mix”, and that solved the problem easily. It's a simple thing but it for the untechnical savvy such as myself, it was probably one of the things I would try in a couple of years rather than now.

After that you should be good to go, I believe enabling a microphone goes through the same process as enabling the stereo mix but instead it just is through different ports.

In conclusion, I haven't tried to broadcast what I wanted to do yet, but so far Ustream is far more compatible with a low end computer like mine than Xfire, or Procaster, and it allows me to stream where I wouldn't be able to, to begin with, so for that I'm thankful, and while I'm sure the stream won't be the best quality in the world, I'm just happy to finally be able to have audio on Ustream.

Small Notes - September 9th, 2011

Just a few small posts today because I can't figure out how to transform them into larger,more drawn out topics.

Front Mission 3 vs Front Mission 4

As a fan of Front Mission 3 when I heard that there was going to be continuation of the series on the PS2 I was really excited. That didn't last for long however, after buying the game at release I found myself disappointed for some reason, I can't exactly remember the exact reason, but I know for sure I didn't really like the main characters. I also can't really remember having a fondness for the combat animations in it either like I did for Front Mission 3. Thinking back on it now however, I regret getting a refund for the game before giving it more of a chance.

PlayStation Portable Streaming

While I've seen a lot of guides that show how to do things like putting a computer screen onto a PSP, I've never found a very clear one on how to do it the opposite way around. I've recently been trying to find out a way to be able to stream my PSP screen to my PC, but so far the only way I've found that works for sure, requires custom firmware, which my PSP does not have. I have not found any alternatives since, and I have done some asking around, due to how difficult the ordeal has been so far, when I do find out how exactly to get the idea working, I'll probably make a guide for it on Singularity.

Front Mission 3 Progress

It's been a few days since I last wrote about Front Mission 3 but I haven't gotten much further in the game. While I'm happy that it's not over, I can't help but acknowledge that the game does a very good job of setting up a point where a ending should be, and then continuing onwards; that fact is also aided by the entire point of Front Mission 3 being a very long game. To make things somewhat more drawn out but not in a bad way, which ever part I'm at right now is extremely challenging, but not in a hard way, every time I make a mistake I'm able to recognize it after the AI punishes me for making that mistake. However on that same note, the game is ruthless about punishing mistakes, and usually the only way to recover from it is to reload your last save. With that said, I still find the game very fun, I haven't been playing it much in favor of doing other things, but I am still as excited as ever to see the conclusion of the game I've never beat for years now.